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There are a lot of great games that have been developed with Flash. Tangerine Panic and Flight of the hamsters come to mind as some of the most entertaining web browser diversions to date. Until now that it! Last weekend we had some pretty serious upgrades to do at work and while we were waiting for all our servers to pull themselves together, we found Line Rider.

Line Rider is a game where you design a track upon which a little sledding figure rides. You can throw him, catch him and wreck him. If you get him going too fast and pull him too hard around a corner, his little sled will crush beneath his weight. The game is designed in such a way that you can return to design mode and make changes to your track as often as you like. You can even save your track and come back to edit it later.

My track involved a lot of air and catches, but others have done some pretty amazing things by incorporating an interesting track with amazing artwork. This video is just one example.

OpenGroupWare is an open source groupware package intended as an alternative to proprietary applications such as Exchange and PostPath. It is fairly robust in its feature set, and even integrates well with MS Outlook.

Its strongest points, in my opinion are that it does not depend in any way on Active Directory, and that it integrates well with open source standards like Open LDAP and University of Washington IMAP. Its downsides are that the documentation is sparse and scattered, that is is backed with PostgreSQL rather than MySQL, and that the package is bundled into a TON of RPM’s.

I have not tried installing it from source, though I suspect that it would not be much more work than using the RPM’s. Anyhow, if you want to install it for yourself, here are some quick scripts to help you, as well as some quick cookbook instructions. I installed it on RHEL 3 Workstation, though I suspect that it would work most Linux distributions.

The first thing we have to do is install the foundation for OpenGroupWare From the RHEL CD’s or Website:

Next, run the following commands to get the database and webserver started:
# /sbin/chkconfig httpd on
# /sbin/chkconfig postgresql on
# /sbin/service postgresql start
# /sbin/service httpd start

Sendmail should already be installed and running, but if not, you will have to install it as well.

OK, so I said before that there are a TON of RPM’s that you will have to install. These can be found at the OpenGroupWare website. Get them however you want, but if you have “wget” installed, you can use my script to fetch everything you need. You can omit the “devel” packages if you don’t want to install the source code.

Ok, so now we have a directory filled up wit RPM’s. Many of these have a lot of dependancies, so the order of install is important. The script below has them in the correct order, so you can either use it as a reference to install them yourself, or just save the script in the directory that has all your RPM’s and run it. Your choice.

These all have to be done on one line or “rpm” will complain that it can’s resolve dependancies:
rpm -Uvh ogo-webui-app-1.1.5-r1717.0.i386.rpm ogo-theme-default-1.1.5-r1717.0.i386.rpm ogo-webui-resource-en-1.1.5-r1717.0.i386.rpm ogo-webui-resource-de-1.1.5-r1717.0.i386.rpm

ogo-database-setup-1.1.5-0.i386.rpm sets up your PostgreSQL database and database user for you. The output should look something like this:

Everything should be up and running now, so you can grab a web browser and go to the following RUL:

http://server.domain.com/OpenGroupware

You will be logged in as the root user, so make sure to change the password.

If you are using this system as a stand-alone server, you are pretty much all set. We needed to authenticate it against our central LDAP, and point it towards our IMAP server though, so I added the following lines to “/var/lib/opengroupware.org/.libFoundation/DefaultsNSGlobalDomain.plist”:

It sucks when you go into a meeting and try to advocate for a piece of software, but people just keep on coming up with obscure questions about random features that may or may not exist. This happened a little while back when we were investigating a campus-wide blogging solution.CMS Matrix sure does make answering questions and comparing products a lot easier.